At 65, Arthur Balderson is too old to live on the street. The way he is going, he could die there.

"He's the typical Haight Street derelict," says San Francisco police Officer John Andrews, who has known Balderson for 10 years. "He drinks, smokes weed and dabbles in a little meth. He's the guy you find sleeping in your doorway."

Balderson gets written up constantly for drinking, blocking the sidewalk and sleeping in the park. In the past 15 months, he was cited and ordered to appear in Superior Court 22 times.

He never showed. The cops sarcastically call it "catch and release." They cite offenders, who ignore the summons and are back on the sidewalk the next day.

A comprehensive program planned to hold chronic offenders accountable - using the threat of jail time to push them into counseling, services and housing - would help Balderson, who was supposed to be the face of the new program.

Except that when he was arrested and charged in Superior Court last week, he wasn't held or offered services. Instead, Judge Samuel Feng released him and told him to return May 22. Given his record of no-shows, a lunar eclipse is more likely.

No one is assuming responsibility, of course.

District Attorney George Gascón says he's shocked by the court's decision. Presiding Judge Cynthia Lee says the courts were "completely in the dark" because the D.A.'s office never explained the new program to them. And Public Defender Jeff Adachi says they are supposed to be concentrating on a chronic inebriates program, which starts May 1.

Maybe now that we've got their attention, they can stop talking over one another and instead talk to one another. Frankly, no judge should have released Balderson.

"This individual has shown over and over that he doesn't care," Gascón said. "It is just inexplicable to me."

But Lee says the court never knew this was the beginning of a new strategy. "It would be nice if they would give us a courtesy call," Lee said. "They could have said: This is what we are going to do, and here is how it will work."

And then there's Adachi, who sounds ready to fight, calling the citations "traffic tickets."

"The judge is required to release people for a misdemeanor crime unless there's a public safety danger. So the judge was right," Adachi wrote in an e-mail.

This may reignite the legal argument from January, when Superior Court began to charge and hold chronic scoffers, some of whom had failed to appear as many as 70 times. Adachi successfully appealed.

That led to the D.A.'s latest plan. Rather than charge scofflaws for failing to appear on a single date, Gascón's staff is targeting people with 20 or more failure-to-appears in a year. They will bundle all the cases together and present the whole package to the judge as a 20-count misdemeanor.

It would be a shame if this dissolves into another legal mud-wrestling match. Everyone seems to agree the current system is broken.

"This small group of chronic offenders is falling apart before our eyes," Gascón said. "They are dying in our streets."

Besides, says Lee, "as a judge, I am concerned about people not coming to court and flaunting it. It's offensive."

Even Adachi is on board, although he's talking about holding problem drinkers in custody, not chronic offenders.

And here's the real irony. Andrews says despite the confusion and infighting, when he picked up Balderson, the 22-time offender said he got the message.

"He basically told me, 'I haven't taken this seriously because the people on the street said it didn't have any teeth. But maybe now I should.' "